Unless otherwise indicated herein, the description in this section is not prior art to the claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Some typical image forming apparatuses (for example, printers, multifunction printers, or multifunction peripherals) include a so-called weekly timer. With the weekly timer, switching between normal mode and sleep mode of the image forming apparatus is set every day of the week and time slots to ensure a reduction in wasteful power consumption. From an aspect of the reduction in power consumption, there has been proposed a sleep mode transition temporary lock command to avoid a transition to a sleep mode unintended by a user. The sleep mode transition temporary lock command is a command to lock the transition to the sleep mode for a predetermined period. Meanwhile, the following technique has also been proposed. When a command to instruct releasing a power-saving mode is input, performing an image forming operation based on only print data of the user who has instructed the release of the power-saving mode prevents a plurality of users from successively discharging printed matters.
However, the technique has not sufficiently examined in terms of the effective reduction in power consumption when the user exceptionally uses the image forming apparatus in the time slot during which the power supply is preliminary set to off by the weekly timer.